Simple and Effective Ways to Build Trust

Good salespeople will create trust by deliberately making promises and then keeping them. So for example, if a client requests some information, the salesperson will promise to send it by a certain time, say in ten minutes, and then send it, even if the information could have been provided immediately. The act of making the promise and delivering on it builds more trust than just responding to a request.

I heard this on a video presentation awhile back. I've forgotten the source but the concept has stuck with me.

Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, also points out that you can become a trustworthy person by making and keeping commitments, even if the commitments are to yourself. He suggests starting by making a commitment to yourself to rise at a certain hour tomorrow.

Great article!

One of the article's points that hits home for me is something I had learned in the first month of my first job outside college where I had to work with customers over the phone and email: Never make a promise you cannot keep. Manage customer expectations; they are the customer's perception.

The article suggests getting things done early for the customer, and that is great, but the customer is also comfortable waiting until the exact time that you specified, too. That early stuff is good bonus cookies, but the core trust issue is doing your thing on time. And if, for some reason you cannot make it, as early as you can figure that out, tell them, and give them a reasonable new time.

As a customer, time is a very important thing to me. For example, when my ISP has told me their tech is going to show up between 8 and 10 AM, 10:15 AM is completely unacceptable to me -- I usually call in for that. If they had told me 8 to 10:30, I would not have had a problem. Even better, if they had called to tell me they were going to be late as opposed to me having to call and find out after the fact that they were going to show up an hour later, I would have been happier.

This stuff is amazingly simple to do, too. I think it relates to an implied point in the article: customers appreciate when you admit your mistakes and arrange ways to resolve them rather than hide/ignore them when they are obvious to the customer.

"The amount of trust you build is directly correlated with the difficulty of your situation when you do the right thing by someone. Your short term loss will translate into incredible future opportunities when you’re surrounded by people who know you’ll do the right thing no matter the situation."

I think this is a very good advice in general. Doing the right thing can be difficult given the constraints that we usually have, but it is definitely worth it. It will sound silly but I truly believe that one way of doing the right thing is to think whether doing it will change the world or not. Once I have that idea on my head, doing the right thing gets easier I think, no matter the context...